Still Bill – When Zen Isn’t Zen

It’s not often that a piece of cinema has such a powerful message or ‘gets through’ to me. In the age of Netflix (as life comically would have it, where I saw this film on Watch It Now!), I’ve grown desensitized to the emotional tugs filmmakers and studios try and seduce us with. Perhaps that ...

Review Overview

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Summary : Highly recommend

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It’s not often that a piece of cinema has such a powerful message or ‘gets through’ to me. In the age of Netflix (as life comically would have it, where I saw this film on Watch It Now!), I’ve grown desensitized to the emotional tugs filmmakers and studios try and seduce us with. Perhaps that is the power of documentaries.

I’ve always enjoyed documentaries.

While each has a necessary bias or slant, when done well, that bias or slant is revealed through the subjects themselves (rather than through commentary).

Still Bill features singer/songwriter Bill Withers, who basically walked away from a lucrative music career to be with his family. He is known for hits like ‘Lean On Me’ and ‘Just the Two of Us’ and will now also, no doubt, be remembered as someone who really seemed to strike at the core of what we may call meaningful in life. The title is really interesting to me and I’d like to ask the filmmaker why it was chosen. My own interpretation was that Withers comes across as having this Zen-like stillness and grace about him. The trajectory of his life suggests that these insights and approach to life are not mere products of older age and wisdom. After all, Bill Withers didn’t even enter the music industry until he was in his early thirties.

He was a man with life experience who took a side journey in to stardom and fame, where he no doubt could have remained had he chosen to. I would love to have a followup documentary on Bill Withers to this. He quotes Thoreau and says things which, like Yoda, come across as incredibly profound and insightful. Here is an example:

“It’s okay to head out for wonderful but, on your way to wonderful, you’re going to have to pass through alright. When you get to alright, take a good look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you’re going to go.”

Until his mid-twenties, Withers had a stutter. In his small coal mining town of childhood in West Virginia, Bill’s stutter was the source of ridicule from his peers.

A teacher once referred to him as disabled.

As anyone who cares to look knows, stuttering has nothing to do with intelligence or IQ. If you watch this film, which I hope everyone will, Bill is clearly very bright. Wherever the film follows Bill, he really connects with people with his infectious smile, his warm touch and an almost Zen-like perspective on life.

I watched this film now in my mid-thirties. I found myself relating to him and was awed by him. The presence he has is quite obviously the result of careful reflection and cultivation on his part.

Wisdom is not earned without great sacrifice and suffering. Christians might refer to it as the dark night of the soul. Huxley hints at it in The Doors of Perception. It seems that, like nature through evolution, human beings garner wisdom scientifically, through trial and error. Nature does this by camouflaging certain plants in nature through DNA programming, etc. It seems nature, like a computer, is in a constant state of updating herself.

Sorry, I got a bit lost. Still Bill was an excellent film which was about more than music. I think you might enjoy and even learn something from it!

About Adam Kō Shin Tebbe

Adam Kō Shin Tebbe (Kō Shin meaning Shining Heart) is editor at Sweeping Zen and is a blogger for Huffington Post's Religion section, writing mainly on topics of interest to Zen practitioners. Before starting the website in 2009, Adam trained to be a chemical dependency counselor. Adam is currently working on a documentary on Zen in North America (titled Zen in America) with a projected release date of 2017.

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